


The Problem Is

by ColdColdHeart



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: Angst, Cylons, Dream Sex, F/M, Gen, Kara Has Issues, Mild Sexual Content, Mindfuck, Season/Series 04
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-02
Updated: 2018-09-02
Packaged: 2019-07-06 00:09:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,009
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15874533
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ColdColdHeart/pseuds/ColdColdHeart
Summary: When it comes to sex, love and skin jobs, Kara has issues. No. 2 might help her through a bad patch. Or not.





	The Problem Is

Helo doesn’t get it at all.

When he hears she hasn’t been speaking to her Cylon husband — and it’s been a good three weeks — he tramps right over to her quarters to give her a piece of his mind.

“I’m supervising daily recon missions and patrols, Helo. Eating, sleeping and socializing kinda become second-tier activities.” But you know what? She doesn’t have to frakking explain herself to anyone. “Also, I’m not you. Got a problem with that?”

He says, “When I found out, when I first found out, I shot her.”

“And what? Is that a suggestion you’re offering? Patch up my relationship with a bullet?”

He shakes his head, way too solemn. “Look, keep one thing in mind, Kara. I was betrayed. You weren’t.”

“What’s that supposed to frakking mean?” Betrayed, deceived: six of one, half-dozen of the other. Anyway, are they in some kind of contest to see who’s been screwed worst by a toaster?

He shifts his stance uncomfortably; he’s declined to take a seat, as if he knows she won’t encourage him to stay. “Athena — Sharon seduced me. She did it because they told her to.”

“And now you’re in love. That’s sweet, Helo, that’s very sweet. Look, I’m not doubting it. Not for a second. But that doesn’t give you any godsdamn right to tell me what I ought to do.”

She’s raised her voice, and already he’s backing discreetly toward the door, trying to figure out how to dodge conflict while saving face. Sam would do the same. In fact, that’s exactly what he did in the memorial hallway, after she turned to face him and then away, back to Kat. When she turned the second time, he was gone.

“Look. I’m just saying. He spent most of his life not knowing. And when he did — well, would _you_ have the balls to tell you?”

“Would I be able to tell myself I was a Cylon, Helo? Is that what you’re trying to say?” She slides back a panel; rummages in the cupboard for something to eat before going back on duty.

Halfway out the door, he makes a last effort. “He’s still the same person. That’s what you need to remember. It should make a difference, but it doesn’t at all.”

“Yeah. I’ll take your word for it.”

And she isn’t being sarcastic, because she can see with her eyes and feel with all the instincts and habits of her body that Sam is still the same person. She doesn’t even have to get close to him. She has no doubt that if she went to him and said, “Let’s forget this frakking stupid thing,” he would promptly pretend to forget what he is, and they would go on exactly as before.

But it does make a difference. That’s the thing.

 

Safe. He was supposed to be safe, like a blast shield or a buffer or a punching bag instead of a real opponent, and if she hadn’t thought so, they wouldn’t have frakked right there in her cabin under the sloppy sketch she’d made of what turned out to be a baseship. And they _certainly_ wouldn’t have done it in the way she remembers so well from her dream, with him on top and her hands spanning his shoulderblades, gripping them hard, and her gaze wandering over his shoulder, over their bodies to rest on her painting.

That dream was never about him, of course.

The dream was a live charge, and he was the rubber insulation. A safe place to put her fantasy — was that the word? — about frakking a Cylon.

No, that wasn’t the word. It wasn’t a fantasy. It just was.

She has never believed in pretending you don’t want things in bed because you aren’t supposed to want them. Let the demure little girls tell themselves it’s all soft focus and flowers. If you want to hurt, you hurt; if you want to get hurt, you get hurt; if you want to frak the enemy, you do that, too. But safely.

“Men are unpredictable, Kara,” her mother said more than once. “They can be violent even when they don’t mean to be. I’m saying this for your own good. Too often, a man who thinks he loves a woman really wants to wring her dry and leave her empty.”

She might as well have been speaking a foreign language. Wring dry? Leave empty? From the time she first noticed the boys’ voices deepening at school, Kara has gone to the one she wanted and gotten what she wanted for however long she wanted and left. Unpredictable? Hardly. Underneath, most of them want the same thing. The trick is to stay mobile. To get away before they get boring.

Or dangerous. Because sometimes they want things they can’t have, or not from her anyway. Not ever from her. But that has nothing to do with love, only with biology. Simon the Cylon Farmer and his cold hands and his lectures about fertility. Leoben using that child. (She clenches her fists involuntarily.) She doesn’t know why toasters want to breed with people so frakking badly, doesn’t want to know, doesn’t care, but there it is.

They always have ulterior motives.

_“Why are men so frakking stupid?”_ she asked Helo on Caprica, when he confessed he couldn’t kill Sharon because she was carrying his child. But when it came down to it, with that child in the concrete cell he’d tried to make look like a home, she was just as bad. Every bit as frakking bad.

_She’s our child_ , that bastard said, and of course she didn’t believe him. She called him on his mind-frak immediately. Then, for some reason she still doesn’t understand, she did believe him. When Kacey’s mother pulled the girl from her arms — so quickly, drawn by a fierce, unquestionable instinct, without asking permission — she felt her heart clench as if she had lost something, and it was the first and last thing she would ever have. The space it left engulfed her.

_She’s ours_. She believed it because it seemed right. A nasty joke, but no more of one than many of the twists and turns in her life so far. The Farm had implanted a fear in her mind, and someone else had gestated that fear and given birth to it and here it was, walking around in the form of a child, and suddenly it didn’t frighten her anymore. In fact, it needed her protection.

Wasn’t that how they always got you, by needing protection?

What does Sam want from her? Is it like the frakking music he supposedly heard? Like knowing about her Viper? Does he know what it is?

**

They’re all the same, the Twos; she wants to think they’re all the same. They all walk the same, slouch the same, eye her the same. It doesn’t matter which Leoben you talk to. When they downloaded, they got each other’s memories; Helo’s told her that. When this one was with her — if it was this one — he downloaded a lot.

“Is it sad?” she asks this one, when everyone else is out of earshot. “Does it break your little heart to know you’re all alone in the universe like the rest of us? Nobody to share your memories with?”

They’re near one of the poles of this godsforsaken planet, in a place accessible only by Raptors. He’s kneeling on the glacier, taking radiation levels at the surface and using some Cylon instrument to get neat core samples. He’s shivering, or pretending to. His voice falters a little as he says, “Believing in God, I’m not alone.”

“And you all believe the same, don’t you? Or do you? Maybe some of you are off with Brother Cavil, figuring out how to trace us and come frakking slaughter us all.”

He stands up awkwardly, as if his knees hurt him. “You know me better than that, Kara.”

She hesitates. Maybe it does matter. “Are you the one who came to the _Demetrius_? The one who found me?”

He scratches his ear. “I know what happened there. I heard.”

“So you aren’t.”

He places his sample in the array and kneels again, back turned to her. From their narrow bridge of ice, gazing just over Leoben’s shoulder, she sees a chasm dotted with smaller mountains, white and cloud-misted. She declined supplementary oxygen, and the altitude is making her head ache.

He says, “No. But the one who came to you then, he wasn’t the one you knew on New Caprica, either. He had the memories. But he wasn’t the same.”

_Are you that one? The one who stole a kid from her mother?_ Frak it. She doesn’t want to know. “Are you gonna stop being part of the herd now, Leoben? Like Athena did? Strike off the beaten path, be a frakking individual?”

He smiles a little, his tool boring silently into the ice. “Didn’t think anyone would ever describe me as part of the herd _._ ”

“You know what I mean.” She wheels around, surveys the glacier, but the others are all working on a broader snow-field down the slope, some thirty yards away. “Did you know about him?”

“Who?”

“You heard me.”

Is he playing dumb? But of course he’s just told her he wasn’t the one on the _Demetrius_. It wasn’t him who helped her with her painting; it wasn’t him Sam collared and dragged off to the brig. (And by the looks of him afterward, kicked the shit out of. She wasn’t much for noticing things at the time, or caring about things unrelated to the strange, sweet, agonizingly tugging sensation that seemed to drag her on, but she could remember the bruises on the prisoner and the grim, maybe just-so-slightly embarrassed look on her husband. What did they talk about in there?)

Leoben says, “Ah, him. No. We weren’t to think about them.”

“The Five. Right.” She’s heard the Sixes say the same, that they were programmed not to think about the Final Five, and she should probably just drop it. Should move away before someone notices.

But . . . he isn’t a Six. When he rises to dispose of his new sample, he looks almost sheepish — as if it shamed him somehow to admit there was ever something he didn’t know.

“All that time you spent listening to the Hybrids spout bad poetry,” she says, “and they never give you a clue.”

He shakes his head.

“They tell you who I am, who I’ve been; they tell you I have a frakking destiny. They tell you things no one should know about me. My frakking mother. Or maybe you see all that when you die and go to toaster heaven for a second; I don’t know.” She swallows. “But when it comes to the — to the _thing_ I have in my bed, suddenly your sources clam up? Suddenly your oracles are like frakking rocks?”

He nods, barely. Ducks his head; continues his work.

It bothers him; she can tell. She doesn’t want to be able to read his moods; doesn’t like scrutinizing anyone that way: a sign of weakness. Captives, slaves and politicians look for their salvation on other people’s faces. But there it is: over the months on New Caprica, she learned to read this face. He is pissed off but trying not to show it; trying to maintain a calm, priestly demeanor. Like a proper prophet, which he turned out not to be at all.

“You could’ve told me,” she says. “Would’ve saved me one hell of a shock.”

He’s picking his words carefully. “The Hybrid speaks like roiling waters. Seeing a reflection is sometimes a challenge.”

“Yeah. Translation: you never had a frakking clue, did you, Leoben? Y’know, maybe the truth was in front of you the whole time, but you chose to stick your head up your ass.”

He looks up then, directly at her, in a way she doesn’t like. His blue eyes too knowing. “I remember some prophecies that came true.”

“Your sick fantasies? Is that what you’re talking about?” She remembers the taste of his mouth and knows he remembers too, though that mouth and the body attached to it are long gone. Waste matter. “Has it ever occurred to you that you were way off base? That we weren’t going to frakking set up house together? That you weren’t supposed to love me, and I wasn’t supposed to love you? That your whole crazy-ass obsession was based on thinking the skin job in the prophecy was _you_?”

After a moment, he says, “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Enlighten me, then. What did you hear? What did you see?”

Leoben stops pretending to work. He crosses his arms on his chest, as if he’s very cold, and stares into the abyss. It’s snowing on the peaks down there, but up here they can see the sun in bright, hectic slivers through the clouds. It strikes her as a furtive sun, a sun trying to evade responsibility for the sorry state of its once-greenest world.

“Maybe I did see wrong,” he says quietly. “But everything seemed very clear. Down to the last detail.”

“You and me.” Involuntarily she remembers the dream.

“But now I start to think. . . maybe my part was only to guide you on the first leg of the path. Toward Earth. Maybe when I stopped being . . . useful, he was meant to step in.”

“Step in how?”

He shrugs, still looking at the horizon. “You two should have a child.”

“Oh, frak you toasters. It’s always that.”

“I thought this was something for the two of us. But clearly not.”

**

Yes, it’s hard to remember her time on the _Demetrius_ : like remembering when you were very sick, before the fever broke. Everything is heightened, distorted, swollen. Everyone’s voice echoes. She remembers telling Sam she felt empty, but even that perception was part of the delirium. She felt empty when she didn’t feel Earth.

It must have been very similar for him. Music, she’s been told. Yes, what she sensed was a lot like music, even if she never quite heard it well enough to pick out the godsdamned tune.

She wanted to frak and not fight, so he obliged. He was always obliging. But this time he pushed her against the wall and held her there a few instants too long, pinioning her upper arms so she couldn’t touch him, his tongue going into her mouth roughly, as if he couldn’t afford to wait. He leaned into her, his knee nudging her knees apart, and kissed her as if she had never yet consented to a kiss.

She remembers having some fragments of thought. _It’s because I clobbered him so I could get to Roslin. It’s because I’ve been so frakking insane lately_. _I keep pushing and pushing, and for once poor Sammy is pushing back._

And the dream. Almost as if he knew about the dream.

She struggled, her hands fluttering, opening and closing on the air. He let her go, but only to begin undressing her, pulling her sweaty tanks over her head. Then she remembered what came next and reached out to bring him close again, her hands in his hair, tracing the shape of his skull. He kissed her, and this time she kissed back.

The next step: on the floor. It was like a dance. He was above her, momentarily blocking her painting, blocking the light. _Wait a beat._ A halo of light around his head, obliterating his face, showing her every stray strand of hair ( _blond like hers_ ).

_I love you. I do love you._

Was she really saying it or just thinking it? But it was all right now. This man, this warm-bodied human being would not understand what she meant, who she meant, what she needed. He was safe.

_A proxy._

Afterward, sitting side by side on the bed, she told him she felt empty, unreal, and he said something that suggested he knew what she meant. He didn’t, of course. How could he? Once again, he was obliging her. Just obliging.

**

Galen says, “I think you better ask him about that yourself, Captain.”

It’s taken her some while to reach this point, because he doesn’t answer direct questions. He sits cross-legged on the floor of his cabin, Nicky opposite him, building something that could be a lopsided skyscraper from plastic packing blocks. Now and then the kid makes a lordly proposal, as if he’s the chief architect — _This will be on the roof, Da_ — and Galen nods and puts it on the roof without answering. They sit in a cleared space a few yards wide, surrounded by mechanical odds and ends, wires and circuit boards and tools. Things he’s been enlisted to fix since his discharge. From the far wall, the voice of Gaius Baltar drones from the wireless.

_“And what is Earth? Earth is not our paradise, no, for all our wishful thinking. But Earth is our reunion. Human and Cylon, we begin to feel the pull of the current that connects us. The common stream from which we sprang. Little by little, because God wills it, we begin to put aside—”_

“My gods, Chief, could you turn off that frakking thing?”

He looks up, directly at her, and she realizes what she called him. After a moment, he says, “It helps me hear.”

“How can it do anything but drive you frakking insane?”

Gaius Baltar. Another mistake, one she hasn’t thought about in a long while. An impulse that seemed at the time like the lesser of two evils. But the slimy little bastard certainly knew what he was doing; once you gave him an opening, he barged right in and put his feet up, made himself at home. Refreshing. Nothing like Lee, always saying _please._

She says, “I don’t think he believes a single word he’s saying. Do you?”

“I don’t listen to the words.”

“Then what _do_ you listen to?” She wants to ask if he’s all right. But how?

Tyrol balances a big block on top of a smaller block; watches it sway; dismantles that bit and starts over. “I’m trying to listen to the quiet between the words.”

“That sounds like something Baltar would say.”

“I’m trying to hear the circuits, the relays. The noises they might make. In my brain.”

He hasn’t offered her a seat; doesn’t seem to have a free chair, and now she drops to a squat. “Oh.”

His fingers make a vague scissoring motion in the air, above Nicky’s head. “You know. Hard drive churning. Memories getting accessed. Programs getting run.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why would you want to hear that?”

He gazes at his boy, then at the packing-block building, not meeting her eyes. “You might want to check on Anders, Captain.”

She can barely conceal her impatience. “That’s why I came here. But you haven’t told me a frakking thing.”

“I used to have these dreams.” In response to Nicky’s soft whining, he reaches behind him and puts a block in the child’s hand, then gently guides it to the right spot. “Dreams about lots of stairs. I would climb to the top deck, stand for a second and jump. When I was in the air, it all went black. It was kinda reassuring, you know? I never understood why. Figured I just really wanted to get off this ship.”

“Galen, you’re not—”

He shakes his head. “Those dreams were a long time ago. Before—” he gestures at his son. “Even before me and Cally.”

She fumbles. “Galen, you wouldn’t seriously. Right?”

“No. I’m fine.” His dark eyes flashing to the wireless. “That’s why I listen.”

“Look. Can’t believe I’m saying this. But have you thought about talking to the others?”

“Other whats?”

“You know what I mean.” She thinks of her conversation with the Two. “They can be pretty reasonable. They answer questions. I’m not saying you should — well, you’re nothing like Tory. We all know that. But it might help you to know a few more things.”

He nods. “If I’d been able to hear the circuits, back when I had my dreams, I would’ve known what was real and what was programming.”

“Galen. I don’t think that’s how it—”

He doesn’t seem to see her. “The dreams, I don’t think those were programmed. It was more like some part of me knew. Like I knew, even before we were together, it was going to be one of us one day. Her or me, climbing the stairs. ’Cause sooner or later I’d know about me, and then she’d know.”

“ _Chief._ Shut up.”

“But only I could live with it.”

She rises to her feet, clenching her fists, resisting an urge to grab him by his lapels and pull him upright. “For frak’s sake, just pull yourself together. You don’t know that’s what happened. Maybe Cally was just pissed off at life, Galen. Maybe she was just frakking sad.”

He raises his eyes; in the dim room she can barely see anything but dark pupil, dark iris. “Here’s the thing about Anders. The Three’s been to see him.”

“What?”

He shrugs. “Trying to get him to come play on the baseship, I guess. They know I won’t come. Not with — ” His eyes going to Nicky again. “But it didn’t work. He’s still here. Anyway. That’s why I thought you might check on him.”

**

This Two has requested permission to learn how to fly a Raptor. She strides right up to him. “Which one are you?”

He looks really mystified. “Which one what?”

“Are you the one I was talking to a couple days ago?” She feels like a frakking idiot, but they all seem to have the same haircut. They all seem to dress the same, as if they’d gone into a thrift shop in the funkiest part of Caprica City and grabbed the first pound of clothes that came to hand.

She says, “Now that you can’t share and share alike with your memories, maybe you should just accept that you’re on separate tracks. Maybe each of you should pick a different name.”

That makes him dimple up a little. “And which one would be Leoben to you?”

“Shut up.” Then she thinks about it. “None. If you want to have a civil working relationship with me, if _any_ of you do, we can forget he ever frakking existed.”

He smiles now, almost flirtatious. “You’re talking about erasing me.”

“Consider your request denied.”

She turns on her heel and walks, but he comes after her. “It wasn’t me you talked to on Earth. But it was me on the _Demetrius_ , Kara.”

She nods; doesn’t stop walking. “And was it you on New Caprica?”

“I have those memories.”

She stops so suddenly he collides with her. “You all do.”

He rights himself and nods, conceding. “We all do.”

“Do you all _like_ having them?” She raises a hand to stop him before he can start. “Don’t forget, sweetheart. The fork in your gut. The knife between the ribs.”

One side of his mouth crooks. “You were very determined.”

“Don’t any of you just not want to be this person?”

He chews the inside of his cheek. “I was going to say something else. It still hurts. I wake up at night feeling your knife.”

“Poor baby.”

Leoben shakes his head impatiently. “Have you ever died?”

“They tell me I have, but I don’t remember it that way.”

“You won’t ever. Be glad. But listen.” And now he’s closer to her. “Do you want to know what your husband said to me on the _Demetrius_ , when we were alone?”

“No.” She tries to shake her head, but somehow midway it turns into a nod.

_Yes, I do. Very much._

He asks very softly, “What do you think it was?”

“I think you’ll say whatever you frakking want.”

“What are you afraid he said, Kara?”

Somehow she’s let him back her into the shadow of a Viper, the hangar wall on the other side. At least this way no one can see them from across the deck. She rolls her eyes, refusing the bait — because, once again, he’s brought it all back to her. He’ll enjoy knowing what scares her; he’ll feast on it.

“He asked you how to be a good little toaster. That was it, right? And you told him that the way to serve the Cylon God is by getting in my bed and frakking with my head. All the things you wish had worked for you.”

“Kara,” Leoben says. He reaches out to cup her elbow with his hand, and it’s only then she realizes she’s crossed her arms on her chest, hunching her shoulders. Is she shaking? Yes. His hand steadies her.

“Nothing like that,” he says. “Nothing like that. I like to play sometimes, but I’ll stop now. You’re in pain.”

“Frak you.”

“Listen to me closely, Kara. Don’t be blinded by the pain. Do you know why I’m here? Do you know why I made this request?”

She says, as nasty as she can muster without letting her voice shake, “’Cause God told you to.” Thinking: Because you’re a frakking sadist. Because you like to play.

“Not God, Kara. It was the girl, one of us, no number. The one you call Tory. I believe Three sent her. She wants to do the right thing, but she’s frightened and insecure. We scare her. I scare her, but she tried to pretend I didn’t. She came to me and asked me to approach you in the gentlest way I could. Like someone taming a wild animal, Kara.”

She realizes he’s still holding her elbow; yanks herself free. “Watch out, then. A wild animal could take your arm off. What the frak is Tory playing at?”

He crosses his own arms on his chest. “Not Tory, I think. She’s frightened. She knows none of us could ever hurt her, but she doesn’t believe it. No. What the Three wants is for us to be seen together. Close together. And, given our two conversations, she may already have her wish.”

Before she’s even absorbed his words, her eyes are flitting past the obstructing hull, into the wider hangar. “Two conversations? I don’t even know which _you_ I’m frakking talking to.”

Leoben shakes his head, as if to say, _That’s beside the point_. Then he says sadly — sad because he doesn’t want to have to spell it out for her, or maybe because he hates to concern himself with such profane, pettily human matters — “On a ship, Kara. On a ship, things get around.”

“Things?”

He raises his eyes, his mouth set in an expression that startles her. Almost angry. “Go to him, Kara. Tell him it will take time, but you’re going to work things out. Say you’ll see him for an hour out of every week. Every month. Something. Because you aren’t just afraid of him. Because you haven’t given up.”

“I was never af —” She closes her mouth, suddenly unable to bluff. He always sees through it. “I don’t want to see him.”

“Then he will leave.”

She shakes her head. “He’ll never go to the baseship unless your frakking sadist God programmed him to. And what am I supposed to do about programming?”

“Programming is a powerful force, Kara. But so is perversity. What I’m trying to say is, people who’ve lost everything, sometimes they do things out of just plain curiosity.”

**

But it’s too late.

She knows where he lives, where he’ll be at this hour of the day, and she practically runs there. Well, she comes as close as she can to running without looking like an idiot. But the door hangs open. Open on nothing.

Tyrol is the one who comes upon her standing in the center of the room, the empty room, gazing around at the empty walls with what’s probably a fish-faced look of consternation. A look that would crack her up if she saw it on someone else’s face. He takes her by the arm and leads her back to his cabin, a few doors down. “C’mon. I gotta give my kid his dinner.”

She sits cross-legged on his floor; watches him opening cans. Thinks: _I only associate with Cylons now. How did that happen?_

Lee judged her for Baltar, and that was just a frakking night. What would he think of what she’s got herself into?

She asks, “Where did . . .?”

Galen nods. “Baseship.”

“When?”

“Last night, I think. I saw one of them hanging around — a Six. Then a Marine came and asked me to clean out his room. We need the space.”

Before she can stop herself, she asks, “What if he wants to frakking come back?”

“Take it up with your people.”

She stares at Galen, feeling tears well heavy in her eyes. She will blink them back. There’s a way to do it. You have to not blink, not blink, not blink at all until they dry just enough, and _then_ you blink. Otherwise, you simply blink them onto your cheeks. “ _My_ people?”

He shrugs, his eyes cold. “Your people.”

“You should’ve told him I came to talk to you. You didn’t, did you? You were too busy listening to your circuits turning and that traitor on the wireless.”

“I told him. Thing is, it was going around the deck. One of the Raptor pilots saw you starting a conversation with the Two, out there on the planet, and she says it was a longer conversation than it needed to be.”

She forgets and blinks. Too soon. “How could he be like that? So frakking stupid? He’s not actually jealous of that — that—”

Galen has cleared a chair, and now he swings it toward her, offering it — a tidy, too controlled little gesture. He is being a good host. He shows no sign of noticing her tears — freely, shamefully spilling over her cheeks now — as he asks, finishing her sentence, “That thing?”


End file.
